Larry Wilson: How can I breathe the air if Harry Shearer's not in it?

I've been listening to Harry Shearer doing satire on the radio in Los Angeles since - geez, this dates a fellow - 1969, when he first joined the Credibility Gap troupe on KRLA.

An AM station doing wild if tremendously well-crafted political comedy? I'm telling you, in that sense, those were the days. How well I remember their soap-opera parody of then-Los Angeles Mayor Samuel Yorty called "Just Plain Sam."

To get a 13-year-old kid from the Altadena hinterlands interested in the mayoralty of L.A., the stuff had to be pretty funny. It was through that comedic back door that I become interested in politics at all.

The Gap and Sheare were able to take their satire even farther in the early '70s on KPCC-FM before it got too political for even an alternative station.

But since 1983, Shearer, now best-known for so many of the voices on "The Simpsons" - and as co-creator of Spinal Tap - has single-handedly produced "Le Show" on KCRW-FM at 10 a.m. every Sunday, creating a phenomenal body of work satirizing the Reagans, the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas and everyone in between in sophisticated fashion, aurally, psychically and intellectually. How much I miss the talks Shearer-as-Nancy-Reagan would have with her friends while having her elbows electric-sanded!

And yet now my every-Sunday-at-10 date has been dashed, as KCRW announced last week programming changes that give the kibosh to both Shearer and longtime station DJ Tom Schnabel. It's got me a lot more ticked off than the cancellation of any old TV show. Shearer and his funny business have that special place in my head only radio can create.

For 30 years, Shearer gave the station his show for free in exchange for the promise it wouldn't meddle with content. And very much to its credit, it didn't.

And let's get real here: Even I, a total radio junkie, listen to a lot of my "radio" not on a radio. It's a digital world, and I always plan my Sunday runs for 10 o'clock, so I can listen to Shearer live on my iPhone - but I'm really listening to KCRW.com, not the broadcast.

And in fact I think the station would like to still be the home to the podcast of "Le Show," but the way Shearer sounded Thursday in an online interview with L.A. Magazine, he doesn't seem so friendly to that notion.

But if it's not from Le Showdome in Santa Monica, "the home of the homeless," somehow, that bothers. Even though his traveling 'dome would just as often be near his other homes in London and New Orleans. KCRW won't invest in its weak signal, blocked by the hill behind my house in Pasadena, so I listen digitally most of the time anyway.

The station allowed the genius that is "Le Show" to be created. And I realize that times change. But Shearer grew KCRW's brand just as it grew his.

I hope Shearer won't just quit. I know it's partly nostalgia that makes me want Shearer to still be on the dial as well as on the Web.

If you've never listened to "Le Show," take this opportunity to track it down at HarryShearer.com. The funniest moments in political satire today are when Shearer inhabits the former vice president in episodes of "Dick Cheney Confidential." In every single one, an unsuspecting chump, often a fellow Republican, is lured into the once and always veep's underground bunker from which he still rules the world. And when the chump, even if it's Mitt Romney, wants to compromise rather than go all-in on some conservative core issue, Cheney chokes him within an inch of his life until he cries "uncle. "

I somehow believe more in the reality of the characters the comic has created out of politicians than in the politicians themselves.

And that's the kind of comedy that deserves to be on the air.

Larry Wilson is a member of the Los Angeles News Group editorial board. Twitter: @PublicEditor. larry.wilson@sgvn.com